Spaying Your Laptop

In an e-mail correspondence posted on PEN American's Web site that's been running this week, Jonathan Lethem tells David Gates his secret for writing fiction: an Internet-less laptop. "I’ve set up a second computer, devoid of internet, for my fiction-writing," Lethem explains. "You should imagine my computer set-up guy’s consternation when I insisted he drag the Internet function out of the thing entirely. 'I can just hide it from you,' he said. 'No,' I told him, 'I don’t want to know it’s in there somewhere.'"

Lethem isn't the only fiction writer to 'spay' his laptop (Gates's phrase); Wells Tower has a similar strategy that requires two desks, fiction and non, where only the non-fiction computer has Internet capability. In the exchange between Gates and Lethem, both opine about the rapidly dissolving distinctions between "text and commentary, original and copy, private and public, book and computer" that challenge writers and readers alike. (The irony that their conversation takes place via e-mail is not lost on either author.)